Find answers to common questions about the LEMR Housing Monitor.
What does “LEMR” mean?
“LEMR” is an acronym that stands for “low-end of market rental”. It refers to the affordable – or the “low-end” – of the private rental housing market.
Affordable “low-end” housing in the private market represents a critical component of the housing spectrum because it provides homes to lower income households where equity-deserving groups are disproportionately represented. In the absence of an adequate supply of social and non-profit housing, it is the “low end” of the private rental housing market where the majority of lower income renters must seek housing, and it is this supply that appears to be declining the fastest.
Who created the LEMR Housing Monitor?
The LEMR Housing Monitor is a project developed by the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights (CCHR), Purpose Analytics, the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association (ONPHA) and R and Shiny Developer Sharla Gelfand, with generous support from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (CMHC) Housing Supply Challenge. This tool would not have been possible without the contributions of dozens of organizations and advisors across Canada. We thank them for their invaluable contributions and intrinsic roles in establishing this tool.
How are you defining “affordable rental housing?”
We created our own rental affordability definition because there is no standardized measure in Canada and those that do exist are more commonly tied to real estate market trends (e.g. percentage of average market rent) rather than income trends.
For more information, please read our data definition on “affordable housing.”
What are your sources?
Our data comes from a variety of sources. Some were obtained from online repositories hosted by municipalities, Statistics Canada, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Some were obtained through submitting freedom of information requests to relevant institutions. Data collection includes but is not limited to the following topics: evictions data, building permit data, housing market survey data, apartment registration data, and renter household information. To learn more about our data sources and methodology, please visit our Data Definitions page.
Where can I find the raw data?
Aggregated data used to generate the Data Maps and Data Stories can be found on the Data Definitions page.
Individual datasets that were retrieved from open access portals can be found on municipal data repositories. Links to these repositories can also be found on the Data Definitions page.
Which cities do you have data for?
Currently the LEMR Housing Monitor includes data for 66 municipalities across six regions:
- Greater Toronto Area
- Metro Vancouver Area
- Greater Montreal Area
- Calgary
- Halifax
- Winnipeg
The LEMR Housing Monitor is created in collaboration with our local government partners. We rely on our partnerships to understand local rental housing needs and changes in the rental housing stock. Our partners also help us acquire data that is not available through open data portals.
I have data to contribute – where can I send it?
We welcome new data submissions from all municipalities and provinces across Canada, including additional data from the six regions listed above. If you are interested in contributing data to assess change in affordable rental housing in your city, please get in touch with us:
What types of housing units are included in the Data Maps?
The types of housing units included in the Data Maps depends on the availability and quality of data in each region. For specific buildings to be displayed on the maps, the originating dataset must have met the following criteria:
- Availability: For data to be included in the Data Maps, it must be made available. Municipalities differ in what data is made available to the public which results in differences in what buildings can be displayed on the Data Maps in each location.
- Completeness: To be included in the Data Maps, all housing units of a given type must be present in the dataset. For example, in a dataset of Toronto apartment buildings containing 10 or more units, it must be determined that all buildings fitting these criteria are included in the dataset. If it was determined that many buildings of this type were missing from the dataset, then we would have decided not to feature this information on the Data Map because the data would have been in complete.
- Quality: For a given building to be included in the Data Maps, accurate address information must be provided in the dataset. Buildings that had incomplete or inaccurate address information were excluded from the Data Maps.
To find out which buildings were included in each region, please visit our Data Maps.
How do I report an error on the website?
We make every effort to ensure that the data represented in the LEMR Housing Monitor is accurate given the quality and scope of data available from our partners and other third-party sources. However, these data may not be perfect and our aim is to continue to expand and improve this tool as we receive new information.
To report an error, please contact us.